by Judy Nickles
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Marilyn said, looking up from the bread she was slicing for sandwiches.
“Kent’s here.”
“Oh, Cece. And you didn’t know he was coming?”
“He’s been assigned to Concho Field.”
“That’s wonderful! Now the two of you can get married. When you’re ready, that is, and I guess you are, after all this time.”
Celeste reminded herself that Marilyn didn’t know the story and tried to close her ears. “I’ll help you with those sandwiches,” she said, going to wash her hands at the sink.
Mrs. Lowe caught her when she came out of the kitchen. “Did you know that ribbon on his pocket is for the Silver Star?”
“No, I didn’t. He didn’t mention it.”
“He didn’t say anything to me, either, but I knew what it was when I saw it. Valor in action. That’s what it’s for.” She patted Celeste. “You’re a lucky girl.”
She saw Kent dancing with another girl, but she noticed he went back to “their” table alone. She brought more cookies from the kitchen before she joined him again. “Sorry. Mrs. Lowe is working short-handed tonight.”
“She told me. It’s okay. Can you sit down again for a few minutes?”
Celeste nodded.
“I love you, Velvet. Just holding you in my arms again makes me want to never let you go.”
“Kent…”
He held up his hand to silence her. “I’ve thought about it a lot. Why do people fall in love? Do you know?”
She shook her head.
“I think I loved you the minute I looked up and saw you leaning out the window at Woolworth after you dropped the apple on my head. And then when I saw you on the sidewalk outside Cox-Rushing-Greer, with your nose pressed against the window, wanting that dress so bad you could taste it... But I know for sure I loved you from the minute I saw you in it at the Roof Garden.”
“I used to dream about a blue velvet curtain and a faceless man wanting to take me behind it. That night, he had your face.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You never told me that before.”
“It was the silly sort of thing a girl does. It wasn’t important.”
“You still look like yourself, but you’re not the same.”
“I guess I’ve grown up. You said I needed to.”
“I needed to grow up, too. I thought I’d done it, but I was wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I had an ego this big.” He made a box with his hands. “I thought I’d taken over after Dad died. Looked after Neil, put up with Mother running my life. I guess I thought I was entitled to whatever I wanted.”
“Claudia.” The name hung between them for a few minutes.
“Yeah.” He took a couple of deep breaths. “But I wasn’t smart enough to make sure nothing came of it.”
Her face flamed.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to embarrass you.” He smiled. “But I kind of like it that you still blush. It’s sweet. That much hasn’t changed.” His smile faded. “I found out I wasn’t as big as I thought I was. When she told me she was…”
“Kent, maybe we should save this conversation for another time.”
“Will there be another time?”
“You know where I am.”
“But he’s there, too. The boy.”
“That’s right.”
He looked away.
“Do you need your car?”
“It’s your car. I gave it to you. Besides, I took some of my back pay from when I was MIA and bought another one when I got home. It’ll get me back and forth from the field.”
“What about after the war? Are you going to college? I hear the government is paying for soldiers to go to school.”
“I might. I don’t know if I want to sell plumbing supplies all my life, although I’m darned good at it. What about you? Are you going to work at Woolworth forever?”
“It’s a good steady job, and I got a raise.”
“Dance with me one more time?”
She thought she should say no, but the next thing she knew, she was in his arms, wanting to stay there forever.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Celeste wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or relieved when Kent didn’t come to church the next morning. After lunch, she read to Jonny from one of his new library books. When he went off to his room to play with the set of cars for which they’d made a garage out of two shoeboxes taped together, she sat down and tried to lose herself in a fashion magazine Veda had loaned her.
Her eyes crawled over the same page three times before she gave up. I’m glad you made it back safely, Kent, but why did you have to come here? Why couldn’t things have just ended like they were? You want me, but you don’t want Jonny, and I’m not going to give him up. Whether or not he’s part of you, he’s part of me now.
When the phone rang later, she hoped it was Kent—and hoped it wasn’t. “Velvet?”
“Hello, Kent.”
“I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed seeing you last night.” His tone was oddly formal.
“I enjoyed seeing you, too.”
“Are you busy? I mean, I’m in town, and we could meet somewhere.”
“I’m home with Jonny, like I am whenever I’m not working.”
“Doesn’t that sort of tie you down?”
“You know I wasn’t out running around before.”
“Right. Well, I just thought maybe we could take a ride and talk.”
“I can’t.”
“You don’t have anybody who could watch him for a couple of hours?”
“Sometimes my neighbor helps out, but she took care of him for me to come to the Canteen last night. I don’t want to ask her again so soon.”
“Oh.”
“You could come over here, Kent. I have to fix supper anyway.”
The silence lasted so long that she thought he’d put the phone down and walked away. Finally he said, “You know I can’t do that.”
“I know you don’t want to. I think I understand.”
“Do you? I don’t. I understood why you were mad at me over Claudia, but I don’t understand why you took in her kid.”
“I tried to explain it to you.”
“That you felt some sort of tie to him because of your father? I don’t see it.”
“It started out that way, but now he’s mine. We’re a family. He loves the ranch, and everybody there loves him, and…”
The click on the other end of the line told her Kent had hung up.
****
On July 4, Celeste took Jonny to Santa Fe Park to see the fireworks. The Thomases, already there and set up in a prime spot, waved them over. “Hello there, young man,” Mr. Thomas said.
“You remember Mr. Thomas, the man I work for,” Celeste said.
Jonny stuck out his hand the way she’d taught him. “Yes, sir.”
Mary Thomas smiled at Celeste. “Why don’t you two put your quilt down here and join us? We were hoping to have our oldest grandson today, but his mother’s a nurse and got called in to work at the last minute. We’ll just adopt Jonny for the evening.”
Jonny helped spread the quilt and plopped down. “Does somebody shoot the fireworks out of a gun?”
“Not exactly,” Mr. Thomas said. “We say they ‘shoot off’ fireworks, but they have a special way to do that. Have you ever seen them before?”
Jonny shook his head. “Nope. No, sir.”
“Then you’re in for a treat.”
Just as Celeste started to sit down, she caught sight of Kent standing on the edge of the crowd. She lifted her hand to wave, then dropped it, but he stood there looking at her until she wanted to hide her head under the quilt.
Mr. Thomas noticed her agitation and the reason for it. “We’ll keep an eye on the boy,” he said.
“No, I…”
“Go ahead,” he said.
Celeste crossed the gras
s, not looking at Kent until she stood in front of him.
“Hi, Velvet.”
“Do you want to join us?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry I hung up the other night.”
“That was two weeks ago.”
“I just didn’t know how to keep talking…about things.”
“It’s all right.”
“Can we take a walk?”
“I have to get back.”
“Just for a few minutes? Away from the crowd.”
Celeste glanced back at the Thomases. Both of them were watching her. Mary Thomas waved, as if she were giving her permission not to come back right away. “All right. For a little while.”
Kent took her hand and led her down toward the river that ran under the Beauregard Bridge. As soon as the trees swallowed them up, he caught her in his arms, and his mouth came down on hers. “Velvet…oh, Velvet.”
She clung to him without speaking.
“I love you so much. Every day at mail call, I kept telling myself that tomorrow I’d have a letter from you. When I was hiding from the German patrols, being smuggled from farm to farm in hay wagons, all I could think about was staying alive to get back to you. I was going to do whatever it took to make things right with you again.” His lips traveled to her throat.
“Kent…”
“I know, I know, the boy. Claudia meant to come between us, and she did, even after she died.”
Celeste pushed him away so she could see his face. “Is that what this is all about?”
“If I took a blood test to prove I’m not his father, would you change your mind?”
“A blood test could show you might be his father.”
“It won’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I don’t know. I just am.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference. You don’t throw away a child like a worn-out toy.”
“I said we’d find him a good place.”
“Where? With your mother? Back with his grandmother? In an orphanage?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. We’ll have our own children, Velvet.”
“Oh, Kent.” She turned and began to walk back to the celebration.
“Velvet, please…don’t go. Stay here with me. We can work things out.”
“Not if it means losing Jonny.”
“But you don’t mind losing me?”
She didn’t turn around. “I think I’ve already lost you, Kent.”
****
“Them fireworks was swell,” Jonny observed as he put on his pajamas.
“Those fireworks were swell,” Celeste corrected. “Go brush your teeth. It’s late.”
“Why do I have to have a babysitter in the summer? I’m eight now.”
“Not quite. Besides, you like Patty.”
“Sure I like her. She lets me ride my bike and takes me to the park and…”
“And being here with you lets her earn some money.”
“You could pay me to be good by myself.” He glanced up at Celeste from beneath the lock of blonde hair that always seemed to grow out the day after he’d visited the barbershop.
“You are good, Jonny, but I don’t like to leave you here all day by yourself.”
“Maybe next summer when I’m almost nine?”
“We’ll see.”
“That means no.”
“Not necessarily.”
“So does that.”
“You know me pretty well.”
Jonny crawled into bed and pulled up his blue bedspread imprinted with cowboys on galloping horses. “Sure. We’re a team, you and me.”
“A team?”
“Yep. Like the Bobcats. You know, the football team at the big school.”
“The high school.”
“They won a lot of games this year.”
“Right.” Celeste kissed his cheek. “Now go to sleep.”
“Okay. Can I have Krispy Flakes for breakfast tomorrow?”
“I guess so.”
“Can I ask Patty to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch?”
“Yes.”
“Can you not hide the cookies?”
“No. Go to sleep.”
“’Night, Mom.”
Celeste turned off the light. “’Night, Jonny.”
When she went to close and lock the front door, Kent stood on the porch. “I need to talk to you, Velvet.”
“Kent, it’s late, and…”
“Please.”
She unlatched the screen. “I’ll come out on the porch.” She didn’t add, so Jonny won’t hear us, but she knew he understood why she didn’t invite him in.
“I’m sorry about tonight,” Kent said, folding himself down beside her on the steps.
“I’m sorry about a lot of things, Kent. I wish I could make you understand about Jonny.”
“I don’t want to talk about him. I just want to know if you still love me.”
“You know I do. Maybe more than ever.”
“Then tell me how you can love a person and not want to be with them.”
“I don’t know.”
“You said you thought you’d already lost me. What did you mean?”
“I just don’t feel like we see things the same way anymore.”
“Only one thing.”
“Jonny’s not a thing, Kent. He’s a little boy. He calls me ‘Mom.’ ”
“And you let him?”
“Why not?”
“I can think of a million reasons why not.”
“I wish you’d at least meet him.”
“No.”
“All right.”
“You don’t know what it’s like for a man to be slapped in the face like that.”
“No, I’m not a man, so I don’t think like one. But I do know there’s a difference in how we look at things.”
“When Claudia told me she was…you know…I didn’t believe her at first. When he was born, Mrs. Peters called Mother and told her, and she crawled all over me. I told her I wasn’t the father, but when I counted back, well, I knew I could be. Claudia even said she was going to the police and tell them I forced her. She didn’t, because they knew her. Everybody in town knew her. Nobody was going to believe that I made her do anything she didn’t want to.” He dropped his head in his hands.
“Then she started talking about us getting married, and I told her a flat no. She left for a while after that. I started working for the plumbing supply company, so I didn’t see her around for a long time. When she came back, she got a job waiting tables in a little bar on the edge of town. She even told me once that she took the baby with her and wanted to know what I thought about my son being raised in a bar.”
He lifted his face and stretched his legs in front of him. “She just kept on and on, wanting me to marry her, trying to get me to fall for her line again. Then she turned up in San Angelo and went after you. She had some nerve going to my CO and…” He brought his fist down on the porch floor between them. “If she’d left well enough alone, if I hadn’t driven her back to town…”
“It was an accident, Kent. Bad brakes. Icy patches on the road. You can’t keep blaming yourself for that.”
“And then her mother dumped the kid on you.”
“It was the best thing that could’ve happened to him.”
“It was a life sentence. For both of us.”
“I don’t look at it that way.”
“All my life, I’ve had to jump when someone hollered, and ask how high on the way up. I’m damned if I’ll raise Claudia’s bastard! But that’s what you’re holding over my head. Accept him or lose you.”
“That’s what my father had to do.”
“And look how it turned out.”
“It’s not going to be that way for Jonny.”
“Then find him a good home and…”
Celeste stood up. “He has a home, Kent. I’m going in now. It’s late, and I have to work tomorrow.”
Without waiting for him
to reply, she turned off the porch light and closed the front door. Then she leaned against it, thinking she was going to cry, before she realized that the pain in her heart was too deep for tears.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Celeste thought Jonny grew overnight that summer. She watched the newspaper for sale ads and scoured the bargain basement at Hemphill-Wells. Her Christmas layaway at Cox-Rushing-Greer was, of necessity, smaller than usual.
The war crawled on until August. There was talk of invading Japan at the cost of a million casualties. Then it ended in a literal flash. “The bomb” was on everyone’s lips. Jonny used his marbles to annihilate a small ant bed in the back yard and renamed his model airplane Enola Gay. Mrs. Lowe said they’d keep the Canteen going as long as there were boys waiting to go home.
Celeste didn’t hear from Kent. Sometimes she felt overwhelming anger that kept her too tense to rest, and some nights she cried herself to sleep. Dreaming of the blue velvet curtain seemed to be a thing of the past.
When Jonny started third grade the first week in September, Celeste told him he could walk home from school by himself, cautioning him about not deviating from his route or talking to strangers. She gave him a keychain with a key for the back door. She thought he swaggered a lot like General MacArthur when he went next door to show it to Mrs. Aikman.
At the end of the second week of school, Celeste came home from work to be greeted by the announcement that “Some soldier guy was here looking for you, Mom. He said to give you this.” Celeste told Jonny to set the table and went to her room to read the note he’d handed her.
Dear Velvet,
I’m being discharged next month, and I’d like to see you before I leave. I’ll call you tonight at eight-thirty. You’ll know it’s me, so if you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t have to answer the phone.
Kent
After supper, trying not to think of the inevitable confrontation with Kent, Celeste called out Jonny’s spelling words for the following week. He insisted on staying a week ahead, even though he never minded getting behind in arithmetic. “I can do it in my head,” he argued. “I don’t see why I have to line up all those numbers and put in the pluses and the take-aways and the lines and the carry-boxes.”